Back on Murder (42 page)

I nod. “We need to talk to Coleman. I got the feeling they knew each other pretty well.”

Robb wasn’t wrong, not about the pattern. You stare long enough and nothing’s random anymore. The pieces fit.

Sometimes all too well.

I’d had him. Zip-tied and all to myself, alone in the restroom at the end of the corridor, Saturday morning on Labor Day weekend, within forty-eight hours of Hannah’s disappearance and Evey Dyer’s death. I’d had him and I let him go, not realizing who it was I was letting walk out into the sunlight. All I wanted was to get out of there, to bag the assignment and move on to real police work, to get my teetering career back on two feet. His fear comes back to me, how desperate he was not to be locked up, to the point he’d even out himself as an informant in front of Coleman. I’d even given him advice, telling him to play it cool next time, never wondering why he panicked in the first place.

And Salazar, when I’d offered to take the kid downtown, had suddenly changed his tune about wanting to see him. Neither one of them wanted Rios in custody. Now it made sense. Rios knew he had blood on his hands. Salazar didn’t want his informant, who’d been tipping him to the location of stash houses, to spend a moment inside, either, afraid he’d start talking.

“I didn’t see it.”

“See what?” Cavallo asks.

But I don’t answer. All the mistakes of the past couple of weeks come back to me. Getting kicked out of Homicide for ditching Lorenz. Spooking Thomson’s wife to the point that she outed him to his killers. Cutting Tommy slack when I should have come down on him, when for all I knew Charlotte was right and something bad had happened to Marta, the girl who spent the night in the garage apartment. It all pales in comparison to letting Frank Rios walk. The trouble is, in a case like mine, mistakes are irreversible. You can’t always work your way back. You can’t bring the dead back to life. And the man you let go might never be caught again.

There’s nothing left but the guilty knowledge of what you might have done, how brave or selfless or good you could have been, if only you’d known then what you do now.

Salazar’s willing to talk, but not with me in the room, the guy who put him in the hospital. His attorney does the complaining, and before Wilcox can lodge a halfhearted protest I throw my hands up and head for the door. Glancing back, I take little comfort in Salazar’s condition, the wheezing pumps and dripping tubes, the oxygen feed, the inert lump of flesh beneath the sheets. Partial paralysis, the doctors told us, the loss of control on his right side. In spite of the successful surgery, Salazar is anything but okay. I reached out and touched him all right, with a hand that’s never going to let up.

I wait in the hallway awhile, until Cavallo comes out to report.

“He’s putting it all on Keller,” she says. “He dragged the others into the business, he orchestrated the raids. It was him who killed Thomson and forced Salazar to cover it up.”

“And Evangeline Dyer?”

“He had no idea she’d be there. When they looked through the window and saw her, Keller wanted to abort, but Thomson insisted on going in. He says it was Keller who shot her, accidentally, firing blind through the door. They were taking her to the emergency room, he says, and then she died.”

“What was she doing there in the first place?”

“Says he doesn’t know. Rios told him it was another stash house, and afterward the informant disappeared, so he never got a chance to ask.”

“What about Rafael Ortiz, the gangbanger who shot me?”

“Says he’s never heard of the guy.” She shakes her head. “He’s not going to cop to that, March.”

I take off down the corridor in a rage. “So basically, he’s not giving us anything we don’t already have?”

“He’ll testify against Keller.”

“In case you didn’t notice, we don’t have Keller. At this rate, there’s not going to be a trial for Salazar to testify at.”

“It’s better than nothing.”

“Not by much.” My frustration is the sort that only grows when it gets an airing. A host of dead-end possibilities flood my mind. “Think about it: he’s been trying to find Rios since day one. When I let the kid go, he was already gunning for him. Why? Because he wanted to put a bullet in him. Believe me, he wasn’t going to ask what went wrong, why the informant suddenly sent them to the wrong house. If he’d have been able to find Rios, somebody like Ortiz would have finished the kid off, like he almost did me. Or maybe Salazar would have done it himself and dumped the body alongside the Dyer girl’s.” I slap the wall, drawing a glare from a passing nurse. “You know what? Maybe he did. That would be perfect. The Rios kid might already be at the bottom of the Gulf. We’ll never find him because there’s nothing left to find.”

“Calm down, March,” she says. “It’s not your fault you didn’t arrest Rios when you had him. You had no way of knowing . . .”

“I’m not stupid. I realize that.”

“Then stop beating yourself up and get on with the job.”

That’s good advice, and I decide to take it. Leaving Cavallo to hold Wilcox’s hand for the remainder of the interview, I bug out, heading back to Montrose with my list of construction workers in hand. Nobody by the name of Rios, but that doesn’t mean the cousin isn’t on the list. I park in front of the site, where some damaged framing is being slowly repaired by a skeleton crew of helmeted workers, stripping my jacket off and leaving it in the car, not a concession to the heat but a psychological tactic. I want these men to notice that the approaching hombre wears a gleaming shield, and more than that, a dull black, well-worn gun.

“Francisco Rios,” I say, motioning them over. “Which one of you knows the guy? He’s got a cousin here, right?”

The workers shrug and exchange glances, one of them asking me to repeat the name. I do better, whipping out the driver’s license photo off the system, along with the picture Salazar took when he registered Rios as a confidential informant. They gather round, squinting and shaking their heads. One of them leans forward, though, tapping a hard brown finger on the page, his eyes drifting upward in recollection.

“Yeah,” he says. “I seen him. You know who this is?” He turns to one of the others. “That’s Tito’s cousin, the one with the big attitude.”

The man next to him looks again, then nods. “I think you right.”

“Who’s this Tito?” I ask.

“Tito the Painter.” He brushes his hand back and forth in the air, like I might not be familiar with the term. “He don’t work here. We got nothing to paint yet. But he’s always around, you know, at the various sites, ’cause he’s working so cheap.”

“What’s his last name?”

He scratches his chin, then murmurs something in Spanish to the other man, who shrugs. “Everybody just call him Tito the Painter. But I can tell you where he stays.” He rattles off an address over on the West side, an apartment complex off Hammerly.

I thank him, then turn to go. Instead of heading straight to the address, I drive around the area looking for other sites, asking workers and foremen alike whether they’ve seen Tito the Painter around, or know his full name. Everybody seems to be familiar with the guy, some even recognize the photo of Rios, but no one can add to what I already know.

Passing by the outreach center, I see Abernathy out on the front steps talking to two slender white guys in retro sunglasses and snap-front shirts. He comes out to the curb for a quick chat, but he’s already told me everything he knows about Rios.

“What about the van?” I ask. “You said his cousin would pick him up in a van.”

“It was white. It had ladders on the side, I remember that.”

“He’s a painter, apparently.”

“Makes sense. It was that kind without windows, you know? Sliding door on the side. I can’t remember if there was a company name. I don’t think so.”

“You didn’t write down the license number or anything?”

He smiles. “I’ll remember for next time.”

Back downtown I go through the boxes of task force paperwork, hunting for the Willowbrook Mall surveillance footage, or at least some stills. Aguilar, sensing my excitement, wanders over and dives in. A minute later, Lorenz joins him, and then Bascombe and Ordway walk by wondering what’s going on. Before long, we’re all digging through boxes side by side, stacking the contents on the floor, my chair, and any empty space we can find.

“Got it,” Bascombe says, lifting a sheaf of paper from the bottom of his box.

We spread the stills out on the conference table, scrutinizing the grainy images.

“Does that look like a ladder to you?” I ask, pointing to a pixely shadow alongside the van.

They all take turns looking. The consensus is that it might be, though Ordway has to spoil the moment by pointing out it could also be a long dent, a streak of paint, or even a missile – basically anything. Look long enough and you see what you want to.

“You have the address,” Bascombe says. “Why don’t we go check it out?”

“All of us?” I ask.

He smiles. “Why not? You want to keep the glory all to yourself ?”

“Let’s roll.”

On the drive over, convoying in three cars, I can’t help remembering my last outing in force, the pointless kick-down of Keller’s door. Hopefully this one will turn out better. We pass the apartment complex and then circle around, cruising slowly through the parking lot. At the front of the line, Bascombe sticks his arm out the driver’s window, pointing up ahead. I crane my neck, gazing along the length of vehicles parked under the complex’s corrugated shelter. At the end of the row, a white van sits, with a long, paint-spattered ladder knotted to the roof rack. The lieutenant parks right behind it, leaving me to pull ahead while Aguilar takes up a spot behind. We all get out at once, donning sunglasses, adjusting gear.

“You know what to do, ladies,” Bascombe calls out.

We’re detectives, so we do what we always do. Knock on doors. Ask questions. Throw our weight around. It’s not hard to find out which door belongs to Tito the Painter, or that his real name is Tito Jiménez, and he has a little cousin who sometimes stays with him. We congregate in front of his door, ready for anything.

“March,” the lieutenant says. “You do the honors.”

Jiménez opens right away, throwing the door wide, no apprehension. He shields his eyes from the sunlight, confused by the sudden appearance of so many hpd detectives on his doorstep, but he doesn’t panic or run, doesn’t try to slam the door on our faces. He’s older than I expected, in his early forties, with a salt-and-pepper goatee, a belly that strains against his white T-shirt, and skin the same shade of yellow-tan as a shade-grown Connecticut cigar wrapper.

“Is this your van out here?” I ask.

He nods.

“Is your cousin here?”

“Frank? He don’t stay here no more.”

“No?”

He pushes his bottom lip out. “I told him to leave. He had this girl here living with him, and I said, ‘If you’re man enough for a live-in girlfriend, you’re man enough to pay your own rent.’ I didn’t like her here, always messing everything up.”

A glance over his shoulder suggests the standards of tidiness haven’t improved. I flip through my notebook, pulling a photo of Evangeline Dyer – not the postmortem snap Thomson took, but one Robb provided, Evey and Hannah in happier times, before the Dyers returned to Louisiana. It’s folded over so only Evangeline’s face shows, the part not obscured by her hair.

“Is that the girlfriend?” I ask.

He pauses to study the picture. The silence is so intense over my shoulder I know I’m not the only one holding his breath. Jiménez hands the photo back, nostrils flaring.

“Yeah,” he says. “That’s her.”

I ask him where Rios and the girl went after he kicked them out, but he claims to have no idea. According to him, they aren’t that close, him and his cousin. Rios showed up one day saying some dudes he owed money to had taken his car and ransacked his old apartment, stealing a lot of his stuff. Before that, they hadn’t had anything to do with each other.

“Who did he owe money to?” I ask.

He shrugs, not because he doesn’t know, but because he doesn’t want to say the name, afraid of getting involved. I push him, and when that doesn’t focus the man’s attention, Bascombe steps forward, all six foot four of him, lowering his sunglasses in slow motion.

“Dude by the name of Octavio Morales,” Jiménez says. “Bad dude, but not anymore.”

“He’s dead now.”

Jiménez nods uncomfortably.

“What do you know about that?”

Up to now, he’s been forthcoming, but the painter suddenly loses all interest in talking. I can’t tell if he knows something and doesn’t want to say, or if he’s just afraid of being dragged into a court case, running the risk of having to testify. Either way, he’s obstinate, so Bascombe decides to wrap things up.

“Mr. Jiménez, we’re gonna have to ask you to come downtown. We’re seizing the van, too. Detective Lorenz, you wanna call us a tow truck, son?”

“On it, sir.”

Before he knows what hit him, Jiménez is cuffed for his own safety and baking in the back seat of my parked car. We take a quick look inside – we’ll be back soon enough with a warrant for a more thorough search – and then gather at the van, not opening the doors or even touching the handles, leaving everything for the forensics team to go over in detail. But we can’t help peering through the glass. Ordway goes around back, using his flashlight to peer inside.

“Boys,” he says.

We join him, taking turns glancing through. A sheet of plywood lies in back, a makeshift floor, with ladders and buckets and rollers stacked high. Along the side, though, near the sliding door, there’s a crawl space cleared from front to back. The white metal between the plywood and the door is marked with specks of dried liquid that look black from here.

“That could be paint,” Aguilar says.

“Yeah.” Bascombe adjusts his sunglasses. “It might also be blood. Anybody want to bet?”

Nobody does. We’re all thinking the same thing. We might not have found our killer yet, but we’re standing just outside the crime scene.

CHAPTER
28

“You look good in orange, Coleman. It suits you.”